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The 2005 “Ig Nobel
Prize” (awarded annually by an organisation called “Improbable
Research”, in recognition of “achievements that first make people
laugh, and then make them think”) for Literature was awarded to “the
Internet entrepreneurs of Nigeria, for creating and then using e-mail
to distribute a bold series of short stories, thus introducing millions
of readers to a cast of rich characters – General Sani Abacha, Mrs.
Mariam Sanni Abacha,
Barrister Jon A Mbeki Esq., and others – each of whom requires just a
small amount of expense money so as to obtain access to the great
wealth to which they are entitled and which they would like to share
with the kind person who assists them.”

(Wole Soyinka would
be intrigued, wouldn’t he?) Every time I come across Nigeria in
newspaper articles and blog posts in the international media, a
sizeable amount of the commentary that follows chooses to ignore
whatever the theme of the piece is and insist instead on showing off
their knowledge of Nigeria as the Land of the Rising Scam, amongst many
other ills.

The chapter on
Nigeria in Richard Dowden’s book, ‘Africa, Altered States, Ordinary
Miracles’, begins thus: “Nigeria has a terrible reputation. Tell
someone that you’re going to Nigeria, and if they haven’t been there
themselves, they offer sympathy. Tell anyone who has been to Nigeria,
and they laugh.”

It was this
“terrible reputation” that so riled the Obasanjo administration that it
spent millions of dollars trying to create a new reputation for
Nigeria, as the “Heart of Africa.” (Forget the fact that when many
people think of “Africa” and “Heart”, the next word that comes to mind
is “Darkness”). Obasanjo went on CNN years ago to play the lead actor’s
role in an ad extolling the virtues of the giant of Africa. “Welcome to
Nigeria” (or something like that), he announced.

It is this same
reputation that annoyed Obasanjo that today riles Dora Akunyili,
Minister for Information and Rebranding. So baffled is she by the fact
that no one seems to see Nigeria for what it really is – a great nation
of good people – that she is often to be found singing Songs of
Lamentations at public events.

One imagines that
perhaps there is a conspiracy against Nigeria, and that even Nigerians
are in on it. Everybody who is anybody has weighed in and put forward
his or her own treatise. Journalist Karl Maier’s 2002 book on Nigeria
was titled “This House Has Fallen”. Diplomat John Campbell’s ‘Nigeria’
book (he was US Ambassador to Nigeria from 2004 to 2007), forthcoming
later this year, is titled “Dancing on the Brink.” Not even the CIA is
left out, years ago they announced that Nigeria has an expiry date:
2015. One wonders why they didn’t adjust it to 2014, the year Nigeria
would have been a hundred years old…

The way things are
going; the way Nigeria’s bad reputation is being ruthlessly colonised
by expat writers and journalists and pollsters and international
organisations, I will not have any NEW bad thing to say about Nigeria
in my ‘in-progress’ book – tentatively titled: “Three, Two, One…”
(you get the drift, don’t you?)- about how awful Nigeria is, and how
close it is to imploding / exploding.

Much of this year
my book has come along nicely; Nigeria has provided every ingredient
for what my synopsis (sent to publishers around the world) describes as
“the most pessimistic book ever about any country this side of the Big
Bang”: the country’s admission into the expanded Axis of Evil on the
strength of Farouk AbdulMutallab’s achievements; that most bizarre
constitutional crisis that effectively “uselessed” much of the first
half of the year; the regular as clockwork killings in Jos; the
buffoon-ridden road to Aso Rock, and so on.

My progress is
sadly being threatened by a combination of two things: the immense
international media goodwill Nigeria seems to be enjoying as it clocks
fifty (call it a “ceasefire” if you will; CNN, BBC et al have been
devoting too much time in recent days to “celebrating” the country);
and the sense of excitement that seems to have seized the country’s
citizens as October 1 draws near. For, cynical as they may appear to
be, Nigerians are ‘confirmed’ suckers for hope, and very few are going
to be able to resist the temptation to revel in the year long
merrymaking that will commence in a few days.

My only consolation
is this: that elections are forthcoming. Everyone knows that elections
always bring out the worst in Nigeria and Nigerians. 1964/65, 1983,
1993, 2007 – the pattern is clear: mind boggling rigging and violence
and entertaining dances on the brink.

With that in mind I am actually going to continue writing my book
knowing that if I’m cynical and negative enough I won’t have to alter
one bit after the elections. Hate me all you want, but when my tome
wins the inaugural CIA / John Campbell Prize for Writing on Nigeria,
you’ll be sending me a congratulatory email…

Very few novels make clear and provocative arguments about
American life anymore, but Jonathan Franzen’s important new book, “Freedom,”
makes at least two.

First, he argues that American culture is over-obsessed with
personal freedom.

Second, he portrays an America where people are unhappy and
spiritually stunted.

Many of his characters live truncated lives. There’s a woman who
“had formerly been active with the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) in
Madison and was now very active in the craze for Beaujolais nouveau.” There are
people who devote their moral energies to the cause of sensitive
gentrification. One of the “heroes” experiences great fits of righteous outrage
when drivers ahead of him change lanes without the proper turn signals.

The central male character, Walter, is good but pushover-nice
and pathetically naive. His bad-boy rival, Richard, is a middle-age guy who
makes wryly titled rock albums and builds luxury decks to make ends meet. He is
supposed to represent the cool, dangerous side of life, but he’s strictly
Dionysus-lite.

One of the first things we learn about Patty, the woman who
can’t decide between them, is that she is unable to make a moral judgment. She
invests her vestigial longings into the cause of trying to build a perfect home
and family, and when domesticity can’t bear the load she imposes, she falls
into a chaos of indistinct impulses.

In a smart, though overly biting, review in The Atlantic, B.R.
Myers protests against Franzen’s willingness to “create a world in which nothing
important can happen.” Myers protests against the casual and adolescent
language Franzen sometimes uses to create his world: “There is no import in
things that ‘suck,’ no drama in someone’s being ‘into’ someone else.” The
result, Myers charges, “is a 576-page monument to insignificance.”

But surely this is Franzen’s point. At a few major moments, he
compares his characters to the ones in “War and Peace.” Franzen is obviously
trying to make us see the tremendous difference in scope between the two sets
of characters.

Tolstoy’s characters are spiritually ambitious – ferociously
seeking some universal truth that can withstand the tough scrutiny of their own
intelligence. Franzen’s modern characters are distracted and hopeless. It’s
easy to admire Pierre and Prince Andrei. It’s impossible to look upon Walter
and Richard with admiration, though it is possible to feel empathy for them.

“Freedom” is not Great Souls Seeking Important Truth. It’s a
portrait of an America where the important, honest, fundamental things are
being destroyed or built over – and people are left to fumble about, not even
aware of what they have lost.

“Freedom” sucks you in with its shrewd observations and the
ambitious breadth. It’ll launch a thousand book club discussions around the
same questions: Is this book true? Is America really the way he portrays it?

My own answer, for what it’s worth, is that “Freedom” tells us
more about America’s literary culture than about America itself.

Sometime long ago, a writer by the side of Walden Pond decided
that middle-class Americans may seem happy and successful on the outside, but
deep down they are leading lives of quiet desperation. This message caught on
(it’s flattering to writers and other dissidents), and it became the basis of
nearly every depiction of small-town and suburban America since. If you judged
by American literature, there are no happy people in the suburbs, and certainly
no fulfilled ones.

By now, writers have become trapped in the confines of this
orthodoxy. So even a writer as talented as Franzen has apt descriptions of
neighborhood cattiness and self-medicating housewives, but ignores anything
that might complicate the Quiet Desperation dogma. There’s almost no religion. There’s
very little about the world of work and enterprise.

There’s an absence of ethnic heritage, military service,
technical innovation, scientific research or anything else potentially lofty
and ennobling.

Richard is an artist, but we don’t really see the artist’s
commitment to his craft. Patty is an athlete, but we don’t really see the team
camaraderie that is the best of sport.

The political world is caricatured worst of all. The
environmentalists talk like the snobbish cartoons of Glenn Beck’s imagination.
The Republicans talk like the warmonger cartoons of Michael Moore’s.

The serious parts of life get lopped off and readers have to
stoop to inhabit a low-ceilinged world. Everyone gets to feel superior to the
characters they are reading about (always pleasant in a society famously
anxious about status), but there’s something missing.

Social critics from Thoreau to Allan Bloom to the SDS authors of
The Port Huron Statement also made critiques about the flatness of bourgeois
life, but at least they tried to induce their readers to long for serious
things. “Freedom” is a brilliantly written book that is nonetheless trapped in
an intellectual cul de sac – overly gimlet-eyed about American life and lacking
an alternative vision of higher ground.

© 2010 New York Times News
Service

In two days Nigeria
will celebrate fifty years of political independence from Great
Britain. There has been much criticism of the material cost of
celebration as wasteful and excessive. Many say there’s nothing to show
for the golden jubilee by way of a qualitative difference in the
people’s lives, contrary to the promise of independence. A good example
is Dr. Mohammed Salami, a retired permanent secretary, who, at last
week’s Akintola Williams lecture organised by the Nigeria-Britain
Association, urged Britain to withhold or vote against any aid due to
Nigeria because it would not be judiciously spent.

There are those who
say not only is there nothing positive to show, Nigeria, indeed, would
have been better off as a vassal state of Great Britain. One of them is
Dr. Niyi Adedeji, who not only called for continued Britain’s
supervision of Nigeria’s fiscal policies at the same lecture but also
volunteered to provide damaging information about our leaders.

On the other hand
are those who say there’s a lot to thank God for. Nigeria fought a
bitter civil war and has managed to remain one while struggling to
manage its diversity. Nigeria may be small in the eyes of some
Nigerians, but a journey through much of Africa will show that it is
good to be a Nigerian, even as we set our sights on higher grounds.
Nigerians of all ethnicity and religions are distinguishing themselves
in various walks of life. Nigeria may have suffered some reversal of
fortune but she possesses the capacity to be truly the giant of Africa
in many ways.

To be sure the story of Nigeria in the last fifty years is one of mixed blessings.

From the giddy
promise of independence to serve as a beacon of hope to people of
African descent, our leaders enjoyed the grandeur of office without the
matching discipline. Avarice disconnected them from the people, which
ultimately paved way for the military’s misguided foray into
governance. From the painful and destructive civil war to the post war
effort at rehabilitation, reconstruction, and reconciliation; from the
buoyancy of the oil sector and rapid infrastructure development, to the
profligate times when Nigeria’s problem was not how to make money but
spend it; from the days of sporting glory when indigenous effort
boosted the spirit of competition and sports men and women took pride
in representing their country, to the waywardness of sports stars that
prefer to monetise honour, the Nigerian media have been part of the
success and the failure.

The limited success
in building a nation out of many nation-states is as much a consequence
of failed leadership as it is the handiwork of a media more polarised
than professional. Historically, media organs in Nigeria tend to rely
heavily on politicians and public funds in their hegemonic contest for
supremacy. Media reporting is often no more than the extension of the
war of the stomach coloured by ethnicity and religion. Ideas are seldom
bad in themselves in our media without wearing a coloured toga,
especially when they touch on our political livelihood. If the country
has been unable to produce a quality professional group of leaders
because of an absence of consensus on the much needed requirements, the
same is true of the media.

As the media
pitched tents with political parties in the first republic, they
parroted their masters’ voices under military rule when the media were
predominantly state-owned and shamelessly went to bed with the highest
bidder in the second republic.

Today, there is a
discernible parochial pattern in the editorial positions of our media.
Many are not even bothering to reflect some balance in their reporting.
The focus is increasingly on the moment, not the hereafter. So, a major
broadcast network cedes its CEO to an aspirant for party candidacy and
every other candidate barely gets a mention.

When they do it is
with distorted visuals or audio sound. What will happen when the proper
inter party campaign commences? At a time the country should be
searching for quality people to find solutions to our stunted growth,
too much energy is being dissipated on the zonal origin of a candidate
and not the character and content of programmes.

If the new
experiment must succeed the media need to reduce the current hysteria
that dominates much of the reporting and focus more on tomorrow’s
progress that can only come from the lessons of the past. The fresh
effort at building democratic governance can turn round things for the
better if we rid our sights of myopia.

We note the ongoing
efforts of our new political umpires to succeed where others have
failed. We urge for more vigilance to ensure they are in tandem with
the national assignment. As the parties search for their candidates,
the media must challenge them to demonstrate clearer vision that they
can do things better than those they seek to replace.

The general public must show greater sensitivity to the issues that
define their existence by going beyond clichés and demanding relevant
programmes and greater commitment to service from the candidates.